What organization rakes in the cash by exploiting the poor and making extravagant claims that never come true? What business is built entirely on mass marketing and dishonest advertising, and yet is never called into account for its failure? It isn’t the tobacco companies or the makers of penis enlargement drugs — it’s religion.

I have no idea whether this is a brilliant idea or just the daydream of an ambulance-chasing shyster, but someone is pursuing Earths Greatest Lawsuit — an effort to gather a swarm of plaintiffs to slam various religious organizations with numerous lawsuits.

It’s an interesting idea. I’m not a fan of the sue-them-into-compliance strategy for social issues myself (I want people to change their ideas, not bankrupt them and make them powerless), but I do like the idea of making religious organizations accountable for their real-world claims.

Besides, God is a ripe fruit ready for plucking — everyone knows the Devil has all the lawyers.

Comments

Riiight. Did you go to the page which allows you to register as a plaintiff? You get to choose which religion you wish to claim against: and their list includes ‘atheism’, ‘agnosticism’ and ‘humanism’.

It’s perfectly possible for some sort of cult to form under the guise of atheist, agnostic, or humanist ideals. Some would argue that the Objectivists who follow Peikoff are such a group. They do solicit funds, demand ideological purity or ejection from the ranks of the favored, in effect worship their founder (Ayn Rand), and so forth. There are other Objectivists who are not dogmatic and aren’t a cult, which just points up the contrast.

Ben Bova had a science fiction story published in the May 1995 issue of Science Fiction Age and collected in Sam Gunn Forever which (relying on 12-year old memory) had a lawsuit over “Acts of God”. The idea is that stuff declared to be a acts of God was by definition God’s fault. Since the Vatican claimed to be God’s representatives, they got the suit. It was also set in the future with some differences in the legal code since any suit like that would get tosses in any court on the planet today. Some Moslems got a mad over it even though they were not named in the story as well.

I would be concerned about the backlash. I fear there would be many moderate religious folks who used to think nothing at all about non-religious people, most people are indifferent to almost every issue, if they suddenly found their old church going under because some atheist sued them, suddenly we might have a few more fundamentalists to deal with. I’m not sure what the right way to fight them is, but I don’t think we can fight them with force.

Personally I prefer laughter. When someone tells me about their religion I just giggle a bit. I then fain an apology for laughing then point out how their beliefs are kinda silly and walk away. I don’t wish to convert anyone, I just wish to pour a little water on the seed of doubt that lies within.

At first the description of this effort talks about things like “faith seeds,” which I seriously doubt could ever be treated as real legal commitments. But then this is mentioned:

Do you believe that religious groups should lose their tax exemptions as “charitable”, unless they can prove that +80% of their income is spent on real charity? Should they be required to make full, independently audited financial disclosure to the public?

Now here is a legal project worth considering: using legal mechanisms to end the charade of letting religions pass off religious activities as being charitable, thus earning them tax exempt status.

That’s a good point about the taxes – if we’re going to go the legal route, that’s definitely the way to do it. Of course, we can’t just go to congress and politely ask them to start taxing churches…

A possible strategy (/pipe dream): first, somehow get congress to open the definition of “church” wide enough that all sorts of groups can start claiming tax-exempt status left and right. As soon as that gets out of hand and the govt coffers start hurting, THEN we get someone up on the senate floor to argue that “payin’ taxes is our patriotic duty as churchgoers..blah blah jesus, blah theocracy blah” – make them think that taxing churches is their own idea – and then maybe the measure will pass. Just a thought/dream.

Things were getting distinctly run-down in Heaven; the infrastructure was in urgent need of redesign to cope with the burgeoning population. So God thought he should chase up St Peter on their engineers’ retention & recruitment scheme. At their next breakfast meeting, however, St Peter told God that no engineers had arrived at the Pearly Gates for months.

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” said Satan, sardonically. “You’ve got it good up there, but what about me? You can’t blame me for taking in a few engineers, can you? There’s so much that needs doing here. I’ve just had one design a bridge over the sulphur lake. Another’s designed an air conditioning system for my quarters. And we got another to design a range of medical prostheses for the inmates after they…. er, well, we won’t go into that over breakfast. Anyway, the list of innovations & improvements that they’ve designed is endless!”

IANAL, I’m an engineer. However, I vaguely recall a Canadian lawsuit some years ago in which the government was sued for breach of contract for not keeping their campaign promises, and the court ruled that politicians’ campaign promises were not to be considered contractual obligations, rather they were to be judged as advertising claims. I wonder where religious claims fall along that spectrum

…campaign promises were not to be considered contractual obligations, rather they were to be judged as advertising claims.

Perhaps it would not be a bad thing for religious claims to be publically portrayed as advertising claims, along with some educational material on the effectiveness of marketing in manipulating people to do things against their own interests.

You can’t just sue religions for being religions. This is just a pipedream for laughs.

You can sue them for various real torts they have done in the real world. Landover Baptist, that inbred bunch of Fred Phelps is bankrupt. After they disrupted the funeral of an Iraqi war soldier, his family sued them for pain and suffereing etc..They won an 11 million USD judgement.

Winning a suit and collecting are two different things. But any real property Landover and Phelps has is potentially seizable and auctionable. Phelps has to do a Hovind, hide the assets and hope no lawyers or accountants find them.

I think suing god directly makes the most sense. After all, he’s directed his followers to put on this ID nonsense, and so it strikes me as a little unfair to sue someone for following orders from above, kind of like how soldiers who participate in war crimes are let off if it is clear that they were just following orders. Maybe some of us could “pretend pray” or something, and once the big man shows up, we’ll tell him jokes over, your ass is served! See you in court, motherfucker!

where someone stops taking important medication because they think they’re cured. The surviving family should sue.

I signed up against my mother’s pastor and her “friends” from the women’s group at the church for convincing Mom that she would be on the outs with God if she accepted conventional medical treatment for what was at that time early-stage breast cancer. Many prayer meetings and lots of hurting later, my grandmother and I finally convinced her to go see an oncologist. By then it was too late to cure her. Her pastor and her “friends” interfered with her and made her do stupid things like not show up for chemo and radiation, and pushed “natural” remedies on her. Her bedroom was a fricking Noni juice and Essiac warehouse. All along she prayed for “her miracle,” and when she didn’t get it, died in physical and mental agony, believing she was being sent to Hell for failing to raise her children properly.

There’s that “free exercise” clause in the US Constitution 1st Amendment that would seem to allow people to wittingly give money to religious charlatans and simultaneously allow the charlatans to legally keep it. If my “free exercise” of religion includes allowing me to become a member of a church or religion of any sort (and it necessarily must), and that membership either implies donations or requires dues, fees, tithes, or any sort of monetary payment, then it seems the charlatans enjoy Constitutional indemnity against any such efforts as “Earth’s Greatest Lawsuit” may put forth.

EGL is also constitutionally protected by 1st Amendment provisions for free speech, I should think, whatever one might think of them otherwise.

If we sincerely wish to confront and abate the harmful consequences of belief in superstition and the supernatural, which virtually all religions promote to one extent or another, our best tool remains patient promotion of rational thought and deed. Lawsuits come and go, and are won and lost on both sides. Rational thought and deed is a winner every time, even though it may not look like it right away.

You people are idiots. Religion has god on its side. You’d do better to try to sue a fascist dictator while being one of his citizens. No, we need something cleverer, more subversive, which god won’t pick up on, not until it’s too late… Maybe a negative campaign conducted in underground publications, or secret meetings whose purported purpose is “worship” but actual purpose is engineering the downfall of god. I’ll get my knickers.

Mason, there’s only one problem with your “I’m in heaven” scheme. If you’re in heaven, you cannot solicit contributions from followers because you have no need of money. Or, by definition, anything else.

Even though the whole Lazarus thing happened a long time ago, I think that *bringing a brother back to life* might grant religion immunity for a few thousand years, and so it’s pretty naive to think you could ever win against it in a courtroom.

I’m just saying, it’s a common misperception that when people bought indulgences from the church, there was no divine act connected with it, specifically erasing sins of yourself/others. And I don’t know where the idea that God is woman came from, that’s just … bizarre.

What organization rakes in the cash by exploiting the poor and making extravagant claims that never come true? What business is built entirely on mass marketing and dishonest advertising, and yet is never called into account for its failure?

Sonja, if it weren’t for the filthy Islamofascist terrorists refusing to be exterminated by our VALUES & smart tech, then we wouldn’t have to frame, lie, & distort their murders so goddamn much – which is not only expensive but soooo sinful.

Why do the dirty Islamo bastards conceal themselves and refuse to get their comeuppance and death for their horrendous and filthy Islamic beliefs & STUPID VALUES?

Mericans help people who have been injured by the wrong religion and clearly don’t have the right VALUES.

did you notice that the man who sued God in that movie (who later became fisherman out of frustration) was also named….
MYERS

Ok it was Steve MYERS (played by Billy Connolly, but that’s quite a coïncidence (didn’t PZ also mention something about his fishing skills ??) And isn’t there a hint of resemblance between Billy and PZ ?

gerry, you remind me of the mentally ill man who hangs around Powderhouse Square in Somerville, babbling at anyone who will listen about “St. Theresa, God, The Peach Tree, and Saddam Hussein.”

You are exactly that incomprehensible. I often have to tell him to leave me alone so I can be on my way. Please, shut the fuck up. You have nothing to say, and you’ve demonstrated that over and over and over and over.

You know, while I like the idea of a mass suing of the Elmer Gantries of the world, the page starts to smell like tinfoil as I read it. At least the Rational Response Squad, as amateurish as they are, aren’t slightly nuts.

If you need a reason not to take this seriously, read the WHERE’S BLUE? page. It’s a conspiracy theory about why the Catholic Church doesn’t use blue even though the Bible commands it (because the Church is the Whore of Babylon, of course).

On a lighter note, there is a Billy Connolly movie “The Man who sued God” in which the plot has Billy as a fisherman whose boat gets struck by lightning and destroyed. The insurance company refuses to pay because it is classed as “an act of God”.

Billy has no option therefore but to sue God to recover his livelihood. The movie had loads of potential to expose the ridiculousness of religion but ended fairly lamely if I recall.